61/365: easiest way

after a negligible winter here in norcal, it snowed, finally! the very next day, a friend and i made the trek to tahoe for two magnificent days of skiing, some of the best, ever! 

standing by my new favorite sign, i am wise enough now to understand what "easiest way" means. it means not driving up highway 80 during a snow storm. it means not fighting with mother nature. it means flowing with what is true. it means listening to my gut and sensing my way toward what and who feels right. 

and i'm learning to live this way. the easiest way. the happiest way.

60/365: surviving and thriving

the day after leap day, i ended up just basking ... because i survived teaching photography to a dozen high school students for two hours!

we started with the notion of the camera as a passport to experiences. i encouraged the students to describe their own experiences while photographing, and then to find stories and imagine how the journalists felt getting the story. with photography, we usually concentrate on the photograph, the subject, while overlooking the experience of the photographer in making that image. i wanted to bring the students' experiences forefront, to acknowledge the value of the experience itself.

then we moved on to two kinds of portraits: those with the subject looking right into the camera lens, and portraits without showing the subject's face. i was moved by the students' work and their descriptions of why they shot what they shot. and they seemed to value the images and words i brought to them. i even got them away from playing with their cell phones for parts of this informal class! 

i experienced mucho stress in the weeks and days before this class, in preparing what to bring to the students. but all in all, i felt our time together was valuable to them and they took away ideas and techniques they can use in their photographic futures, which were the most important things. one student even gushed as i departed, "you were the best guest presenter we've ever had!" which felt great!

59/365: i am not my hair

it was a few years ago now that a man in france, i think he was a greek tourist, commented on my hair, comparing it to my dog's. we didn't understand each other well, or maybe not at all. but he said it with a big smile on his face, wasn't being unkind.

what? i thought to myself, my hair is white? like daisey's? but IT WAS! it was growing out white. after decades as a bottle-blond. 

it took years for all the blond to grow out long enough to be chopped off, leaving only gray. it was an uncomfortable, and not very pretty, process.

these days i hear frequent comments on my hair. strangers regularly stop me to offer compliments, recently at the airport. i have grown into my gray hair, and am no longer upset, at all, by people noticing it. it is what it is, and i try to take care of it. keep it healthy and hydrated. that's all. 

daisey goes to the groomer for haircuts much more often than i, and comes home with such closely cropped fur that she looks almost naked, like a large rat, not as cute as the furrier version. but she looks out of those innocent eyes with the same love and openness. i still look in her eyes and each time remember, she is just as she was before the hair cut. she is NOT her hair.

and i am not mine.

 

58/365: lips

sometimes my universe is comprised of a bowl of soup and some croutons, my dog by my side, friends, photography, music, art, books, and i can cast a wide net around all my interests, work, and ways i want to spend my time. lately, though, my universe revolves around just one thing ... my sweetheart's lips. oh, and one other thing: how and when they will meet mine.